The Florida Project

The Florida Project is rooted in deep empathy. Sean Baker’s follow-up to his audacious, iPhone-shot trans tale Tangerine is an exuberant portrait of the marginalised long-term residents of a gaudy motel on the outskirts of Orlando’s Disney World, told from the perspective of mischievous six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). As a rule, movies about adorably precocious kids tend to test my gag reflexes rather than tug at my heartstrings, even when they’re as artfully made as Benh Zeitlin’s post-Katrina fable Beasts of the Southern Wild, to which The Florida Project has been compared. But where Zeitlin succumbed to sentimentality, Baker remains clear-eyed, deftly juxtaposing the innocent joy of the world as Moonee sees it with a far more sober assessment of her precarious situation. First-time actor Bria Vinaite, whom Baker discovered on Instagram, is sensational as Moonee’s young mother Halley. And Willem Dafoe delivers one of the performances of his career as the motel manager trying to do right by his vulnerable tenants.